If you ask a conventional medicine practitioner to help you address your skin problem, you’ll likely go home with a prescription.

If you have psoriasis or eczema, for example, your doctor will probably suggest pills to shut down a part of your immune system, helping to calm inflammation.

If you have acne or rosacea, the conventional approach often involves antibiotics to kill off skin bacteria that contribute to breakouts.

While these and other conventional solutions can certainly help to manage and reduce symptoms, they don’t address the underlying problem. As a result, you often must use these prescriptions—and deal with their side effects—long term, if not the rest of your life.

In functional medicine, we view skin issues very differently.

Your skin is a window into your body.

Dermatological problems often hint at deeper, more systemic issues. Address those imbalances, and you’ll end up with youthful, clear skin on the surface.

Read on to learn my top tricks to get glowing skin from within.

The Hidden Driver of All Skin Issues

On the surface, many skin issues seem like separate problems that require separate solutions.

Acne comes from excess oil (sebum) that clogs and infects pores. Psoriasis is the result of an autoimmune reaction. Rosacea is triggered by heat, exercise, and stress. You get the idea.

However, if you dig deeper, you’ll find that these seemingly disparate conditions all share one key feature: inflammation.

Of course, there’s the localized inflammation characterized by swollen, red, irritated, and painful bumps and patches of skin.

However, long before localized inflammation ever erupts, chronic, low-level, bodywide inflammation can lurk beneath your skin’s surface. Indeed, for nearly a decade, scientists have known that levels of C-reactive protein—a marker of chronic, low-level, bodywide inflammation—can predict someone’s risk of getting everything from psoriasis to rosacea to eczema.^1–3

For example, with acne, a chronic, low-level immune response can create a bacteria-friendly environment in the oil-producing glands in your skin, leading to pimples.^4–6

In other skin conditions, this inflammation can dilate tiny blood vessels, making them more permeable. As these vessels leak fluids, swelling results. The immune system then responds with inflammatory cells that cause even more swelling and redness.^7–9

So all of this begs the question: If chronic, systemic inflammation is messing with your skin, what’s causing the chronic, low-level inflammation in the first place?

Well, without running a series of tests, I can’t know for sure what your unique situation is. However, if you’re like the thousands of people with skin conditions that I’ve treated over the years, the chronic inflammation likely stems from one of the following:

Insulin Resistance

Insulin is a hormone that shuttles blood glucose into cells that need it.

However, if you have insulin resistance, that means your cells don’t respond appropriately to the hormone. This forces the pancreas to make even more to do the job. Sometimes, even these high amounts of insulin aren’t enough to manage blood glucose. As a result, both insulin and blood glucose remain elevated.

This metabolic disruption stimulates fat storage and the production of inflammatory cells, which can create a vicious cycle by leading to even more insulin resistance and potentially contributing to all of the following conditions: ^10–12

Skin tags¹³
Acne¹⁴
Psoriasis¹⁵
Rosacea¹⁶
Dry, itchy skin¹⁷
Dandruff¹⁸
Excessive hair growth¹⁷

Gut Issues

Trillions of bacteria line the walls of your gut. When in balance, these bugs promote good health. When disrupted, however, bad bacteria can start to outnumber the good ones, creating a toxic environment that weakens your gut lining.

As your gut lining weakens, it becomes more permeable, allowing contents from your gut to leak into your bloodstream. Your immune system reacts to your bloodstream’s new guests with systemic inflammation.¹⁹

Nutrient Deficiencies

A handful of anti-inflammatory nutrients can help to keep systemic inflammation in check, including magnesium, vitamin D, omega-3 fatty acids, and B vitamins.^20–22 However, it can be difficult to consume enough from food alone.

When you’re deficient in any of those nutrients, your body has a harder time putting the brakes on chronic, systemic inflammation.

How to Heal Your Skin from Within

Use the following four-step plan to uproot some of the most common causes of inflammation and the skin problems that follow.

Step #1: Identify and Remove Problematic Foods

Many foods can mess with your gut, creating a cascade of inflammation that eventually messes with your skin. Common offenders include dairy, soy, gluten, tree nuts, eggs, peanuts, shellfish, corn, sugar, caffeine, nitrates, and ultra-processed foods and their many additives and preservatives.

There’s only one way to figure out which foods cause problems for you: an elimination diet. You remove the most common allergens and gut inflammation triggers for four to six weeks. Then, you reintroduce one food once every three or four days.

For example, you can reintroduce dairy for three days and see if you react. If you don’t have any issues, then you try gluten for three days and see what happens, and so on.

This is the basic logic behind my 10-Day Detox, which includes a structured elimination of inflammatory foods while replacing them with nutrient-dense whole foods that support skin, gut, and metabolic health.

For a true elimination test, consider the Detox your kickstart, then continue avoiding your suspected trigger foods (e.g., gluten, dairy, sugar, ultra-processed foods) for a few more weeks before reintroduction.

(For a much deeper dive into the whys and hows of elimination diets, listen to my podcast episode with registered dietitian Lisa Dreher.)

Step #2: Follow an Anti-Inflammatory Diet

During and long after...

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